The Journey Is the Point

The finished heron tattoo, created by Diego at Ancient Rituals in Killarney.

I have just come home from Killarney with a heron tattooed down the back of my calf, which is a strange sentence to write and stranger still when I look down and see it there. This morning it existed on paper, something I could enlarge or reduce, alter the dots, question the circle, put away for a day and come back to when I had another idea. Now it is on my leg, and of all the thoughts that had occupied me in the weeks beforehand, it was the permanence of that which seemed particularly significant as I got up this morning.

I had never had a tattoo and had no idea how much it would hurt, whether the back of the calf was an unnecessarily ambitious place to begin, or whether something that looked beautiful on paper might look rather less convincing wrapped around the leg of a fifty-five-year-old man. There would certainly have been less to worry about had I chosen a discreet little heron somewhere around my ankle, but somewhere along the way discretion had gone out the window and I had settled on something that would run almost the full length of my calf. By this morning there was nothing useful left to consider. I had an appointment in Killarney and eventually I simply had to get in the car.

None of this would have happened without Brian and Grainne. I had mentioned getting a tattoo once, almost in passing, not as a plan but as something I thought I might like to do, the sort of idea that can be entertained quite happily for years precisely because nothing requires you to act on it. They happened to overhear me and, more importantly, remembered. When I retired, they gave me a voucher for Ancient Rituals in Killarney.

I laughed when I opened it, partly at the fact that they had remembered something I had barely remembered saying myself, and partly because I knew exactly what they had done. They hadn’t given me a tattoo, but they had made it considerably more difficult for me to spend the next ten years talking about getting one. What had been a passing thought now had somewhere to happen and, in time, someone to do it. His name was Diego.

Ancient Rituals in Killarney, where Diego turned a retirement gift into something rather more permanent.

Ancient Rituals was already busy when I arrived, not frantically so, but with the easy coming and going of a place where artists and regular customers knew one another and conversations seemed to carry across the room. “How are you doing, my friend?” I heard more than once. At one point the talk turned to dating and somebody described the available pool as “very small”, which caused great amusement before another voice settled the matter with, “Love is love, my brother.” I had spent the morning imagining something altogether more solemn and was relieved to discover that nobody else appeared to regard what was about to happen to me with anything like the gravity I did.

Inside Ancient Rituals, Killarney, where the afternoon light caught the artwork lining the studio walls.

Diego was slim, wearing a vest cut low at the neck and sides, the shape of it revealing the colourful tattoos covering much of his torso. He moved easily between English with me and his own language with his colleagues, joining in with the radio every now and then as he went about getting things ready. There was an ease to him that helped. He printed the design and held it against the back of my calf, measuring and considering the proportions, and after looking at it together we decided that it needed to be about ten per cent bigger. Having spent much of the morning wondering if my first tattoo was already a little ambitious, increasing its size once I arrived at the tattoo studio might appear an odd decision, but it looked better, and that was that.

When the transfer was applied, Diego took a video of my leg and showed it to me. That was the first moment when the whole thing moved beyond something I had been planning. The heron was there, stretching down my calf, the circle and dots around it, the long line travelling through the design. It was still only a transfer and I could, in theory, have washed the whole thing away and gone home.

I didn’t want to.

“Now, my friend. Looking nice.”

I thought so too.

A last photograph before Diego began — when the heron was still only a design.

Before we started, Diego asked if I was comfortable and whether I needed a pillow. I told him I was fine. He said it could take an hour or more, and an hour seemed perfectly manageable, particularly as various members of my family had assured me that a tattoo didn’t really hurt. What I could expect, apparently, was something resembling a gentle picking sensation.

They lied.

It was sore. Not unbearable, and never enough to make me consider asking him to stop, but sufficiently sore for Diego’s estimate of an hour to become something I took a sudden and very keen interest in. I was lying face down on the outstretched tattoo chair, almost completely flat, and since there wasn’t a great deal available to me by way of distraction I began to pay attention to whatever happened to fall within sight.

There was a light, click-in-place wooden floor beneath me, a Dyson air conditioner humming nearby as it turned from side to side, and to my right a drawer cabinet covered in tattoo stickers — Flying Monkey, Kieran Herlihy Tattoo, Murostar, Stormcrow, Elmimo, Dragonhawk Tattoo Supply. Black Nike runners appeared to be particularly popular among the artists, something I became aware of only because so many pairs passed through the small portion of the room visible from where I was lying. I even found myself studying an unusual cube-shaped plug socket, an object that on any other day would have struggled to hold my attention for more than a second.

Above me, life in the studio continued perfectly normally. People talked, customers came and went, Diego moved between conversations with his colleagues and occasional remarks to me, and the radio played on. Every so often he sang along and at one point, from somewhere behind me, I heard him contribute just two words to whatever song was playing.

“Piña colada…”

I looked at my watch.

We were nowhere near an hour.

I resisted for a while before checking again and was disappointed to discover that time had continued at much the same pace. Somewhere during all of this I began silently saying a few prayers, and Brian and Grainne featured prominently, although whether I was praying for them or holding them responsible for the fact that I was lying there in the first place became increasingly difficult to distinguish. What I had also failed to appreciate was the precision of Diego’s language. He had not said it would take an hour. He had said an hour or more, and as the afternoon progressed those final two words began to acquire considerably greater importance.

Eventually the machine stopped. Diego wasn’t finished, but he wanted to leave my leg alone for a few minutes before completing the last part, and I cannot remember having appreciated silence quite so much. Almost immediately my phone buzzed. Lara was asking if I wanted to join them for lunch and then, naturally, how it was going. I sent her the photograph Diego had just taken.

Wow — it looks great though. No pain no gain.

There are moments when a proverb is more welcome than others. Had she sent it half an hour earlier, I might have had a different response, but the needle had stopped, my leg was already settling and the photograph did look good. With Diego safely occupied elsewhere for a few minutes, I found myself beginning to agree with her.

He came back, finished the remaining work and cleaned my leg, and suddenly there was nothing more to be done. Before I left he ran through the practicalities: no sauna or swimming for four days, showering was fine, and afterwards there was something I needed to get from the chemist. He wrote the name for me in green marker on a small piece of paper — Bepanthen — and I put it away. I had spent the morning thinking about the enormity of having something permanently marked on my skin and left carrying a note reminding me to buy ointment.

From Ancient Rituals I went to Café du Parc, where Lara and Britt were treating us to lunch, and met them there with Sophie, Jillian and Claire. I was conscious of my leg as I walked, not because it was particularly painful by then, but because I knew something was there that had not been there when I walked through Killarney earlier that day. Café du Parc was quite a change from the room I had just left: chandeliers reflected in great banks of mirrors, palms and broad green leaves around us, warm light and an old Cinzano advertisement looking down over the room. Everyone wanted to see the tattoo, of course, and by then I was delighted to show it off. It is remarkable how quickly pain recedes in the memory when it has stopped, and when my eye settled on a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, I felt the afternoon had improved immeasurably.

Café du Parc afterwards — where a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc suddenly seemed particularly well deserved.

It is only since coming home that I have had the chance to look at the tattoo without wondering what was about to happen next. The heron itself had always been the easiest decision. There is a rookery behind our house in Glenbeigh and for years the birds have been part of the landscape around us, standing for long periods before lifting themselves into the air, their great wings moving slowly, necks folded back and long legs trailing behind. I liked them long before I had any reason to attach meaning to them, and they were there long before Heron & Moss had a name.

That distinction is important to me because I would hate to think I had simply tattooed the emblem of my own website onto my leg. The truth is the other way around. Heron & Moss borrowed its heron from the place where we live, from birds I had been watching for years before any of this began, and the tattoo comes from the same place.

The original design — the heron, circle, dots and line that Diego would translate from paper to skin.

The circle, dots and lines took longer to settle. At one stage I had explanations for all of them, each part carrying its own significance, until I began to feel I was trying too hard to make a life fit inside a drawing. The dots mattered to me because they could be people, places or moments, some larger than others, some almost insignificant when they first appeared. There are things I can identify immediately as having changed the direction of my life, but others only became visible when I looked back: a conversation I thought little of at the time, somebody who offered a kindness and probably forgot it, a room that remains vivid decades after I last stood in it, people who were part of my life for only a short while and others who have travelled much further with me.

Even today’s tattoo began that way, with a remark made casually enough that I had almost forgotten it, but Brian and Grainne hadn’t. Months later I found myself lying on a tattoo chair in Killarney saying prayers for the pair of them while Diego worked a heron into the back of my leg. There is something about that chain of events I rather like.

For thirty-four years there was a recognisable shape to my life. The school calendar had its own momentum and one September reliably followed another; children arrived and left, problems presented themselves, decisions had to be made, and however complicated a particular day became there was usually somewhere I knew I had to be the following morning. Retirement removed that certainty much more abruptly than I had expected, and Heron & Moss has grown out of what came afterwards. I thought at first that I would write about interiors and houses, but almost every time I sat down, something else appeared: people, food, objects, places, rooms I could still see clearly, voices I hadn’t heard for years, incidents that had seemed entirely ordinary when they happened and had somehow refused to disappear.

Perhaps that is why, now that I can finally look at the tattoo without thinking about needles, the part I find myself drawn to isn’t actually the heron. It is the line that comes into the design, passes through the circle and the bird, encounters the dots along the way and then carries on beyond them.

For most of my life I think I would have wanted to know where that line was going.

Tonight, I am quite happy that it doesn’t say.